Today is March 17th, 2009 and the Wikibon community is gathering at 12 Noon EST to discuss how California State University East Bay (CSUEB) averted a power crisis in its data center. We're pleased to welcome our guest:

Rich Avila - Director of Network Operations at California State University, East Bay.

Peer Incites are an open conference call where the Wikibon community shares knowledge about applying technology solutions to business challenges. This is an open forum where anyone is free to ask questions and participate.

Here are the call in details.

• 4* Mutes your phone line
• 4* Un-mutes your line to speak

If speaking, please introduce yourself (first name only is fine).

Power Crisis

What do you do if your data center is out about to run out of power and your utility company can't deliver any more juice? That was the situation facing John Charles, CIO and Rich Avila of CSU East Bay. The answer was to take quick action, virtualize servers and storage and begin to rapidly consolidate physical resources and unplug gear.

Read the case study.

Agenda

Today we'll discuss three main areas:

• The Crisis
• Plan of Action taken by CSUEB
• The Results to Date

Before and After

Figure's 1-4 below show the data center transformation at CSUEB, which had over one hundred servers.

Figure 1 shows part of the 100 server infrastructure at the CSUEB data center (Source: Wikibon, 2008)

Figure 2 is a composite picture of 3PAR and Sun equipment to run 100 virtual servers under VMware

Figure 3 shows a before and after shot of the server and storage infrastructure at the CSUEB data center (Source: Wikibon, 2008)

Figure 4 shows the lights out data center at CSUEB (Source: Wikibon, 2009)

Action Item: Check back on Wikibon over the next 24 - 48 hours to read the research notes from this Peer Incite research meeting, or check out the Peer Incite Archive to read other notes and hear the mashed up podcast of this and other sessions.

Footnotes: